#whee happy 2025 i'm back again but then i'm not sorryyy

[fateandloveentwined]

LotR is not about Frodo—and that makes it beautiful.

Fellowship is about the fellowship. All nine of them. Then they break, and Two Towers is about Minas Morgul and Isengard, which gives us Frodo and an increasing amount of Sam; Isengard on Merry, Pippin and Treebeard (ents!) then later the rest of the troop; Returning of the King is Aragorn. The Lord of the Rings is, well, Sauron.

None of the titles is about Frodo.

At some point the narrative delves into everything but Hobbits, and the book ends with Sam.

Fellowship had me loving Frodo, from Book 1 on, and Aragorn and Gandalf. In the Two Towers and at the ending of Fellowship I loved Gimli and Legolas; Merry and Pippin were kind of, inadequate and woefully unprepared. Sam and Smeagol deserve a mention. In Book 5 Meriadoc and Peregrin I truly loved, and in Book 6 no more could be said of Sam Gamgee—then in the end all of them, Frodo and Aragorn, Bilbo and Gandalf and Galadriel, Elrond as they sail across setting sun to the ainur's musics of the West. Sam turns back, and he is with Rose and their young Elanor. Aragorn with Arwen rules Arnor and Gondor; Gimli and Legolas on their wild travels and Merry and Pippin on theirs. It’s a journey through and through, and in the end you fall in love all of them (Smeagol being the cutest name (i'm sorry fight me)); usually I just delve deep into fandoms with one single character but Tolkien makes them work, breathes life into all of them.